I ran into this BBC story about the French AZERTY Keyboard in its original typewriter. Many feel the traditional keyboard needs an update to address issues like the difficulty in creating accented letters (definitely easier on a computer) and finding ways to also type regional languages like Breton (which uses ñ to mark nasal vowels), Occitain and Polynesian languages (which may use the long marks as in ā.
Looking at the photo, I noticed that the traditional AZERTY keyboard is also missing the 1 digit character, replacing it with the much used é character (shifts to ù of où. My mother’s typewriter was also missing the 1 key: you were supposed to use the lowercase L (l) key. That’s a solution that sort of worked on paper, but is terrible for encoded text.
There alternate layouts proposed including a BÉPO layout. I wonder if it will have better luck than DVORAK English keyboard layouts.
